Evaluating Performance of Photographs for Marine Citizen Science Applications

Katherine Newcomer,Brianna M Tracy,Andrew L Chang,Gregory M Ruiz

doi:10.3389/fmars.2019.00336

Katherine Newcomer, Brianna M Tracy + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/fmars.2019.00336

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Abstract

Long-term measurements are imperative to detect, understand, and predict changes in coastal biological communities, but can be both costly and difficult to implement. Here, we compare measurement methods used to document community structure and assess changes in marine systems, and explore potential applications in citizen science. The use of photographs for species identifications and monitoring has become a popular and useful data collection tool, but its use requires evaluation of its effectiveness in comparison to data collected from live examinations. We used settlement panels in San Francisco Bay, a well-studied and vital coastal ecosystem, to compare standardized measures of the invertebrate fouling community through examination of live organisms in the field and via photographs. Overall, our study found that live measurements were more accurate and better represented these marine communities, having higher richness and diversity measurements than photographic measurements. However, photographic analyses accurately captured the relative abundances of some species and functional groups. We suggest that highly recognizable target taxa or broad scale comparisons of functional group composition are easily tracked through photographs and offer the best potential for research conducted by citizen scientists.

Highlights

Due to challenges presented by large-scale research efforts and the growing need to monitor our coastal communities for threats from climate change, pollution, and invasive species (Ruiz et al, 1997; Stachowicz et al, 2002; Thiel et al, 2014), scientists have begun to develop, and identify areas where collaborations with citizen scientists would be most helpful (Dickinson et al, 2010)
When directly compared, photobased richness scores were representative of live point count richness scores, though significantly different with an average of 2.5 species not counted in photos (94.5% within limit of agreement (LOA); Supplementary Material)
Our results indicate that richness and diversity scores recorded from photographs are not fully representative of the richness and diversity recorded by experts using microscopic examination of live samples

Summary

Introduction

Due to challenges presented by large-scale research efforts and the growing need to monitor our coastal communities for threats from climate change, pollution, and invasive species (Ruiz et al, 1997; Stachowicz et al, 2002; Thiel et al, 2014), scientists have begun to develop, and identify areas where collaborations with citizen scientists would be most helpful (Dickinson et al, 2010). The involvement of the general public in collecting and analyzing scientific data, is an increasingly important and useful approach to research that broadens public engagement in science. Some past bias against citizen scientists may be attributed to under-reporting of their efforts in research (Silvertown, 2009), and resulting in a lack of evidence supporting the use of data generated (Cooper et al, 2014).

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